Saturday, 7/27/2019
Did nothing much between breakfast and departing for the Museum at 11am. Did my docent round, people liked it.
This morning I remembered the window handles at Tasso street. They are brass, and I think three times over the 40+ years I lived there, I polished them. They come up with a lovely warm shine, then over a decade or so, turn dark brown again. Which they are now, and I really would like them shiny. It’s not that bad of a job, especially if I were to use some kind of power tool. I have a good cordless drill, but I don’t have a buffer attachment for it. That’s a rubber disk on a spindle; you chuck it into the end of the drill and tie a lambs-wool pad over the disk, and then you can whizz away with your tool.
So I stopped on the way home at the hardware store intending to pick up a buffer disk, and to my surprise they didn’t have them. So at home I opened up Amazon and ordered one. It will arrive Monday, but that means I can’t, as I’d sort of planned, go do any buffing of window handles tomorrow. Well, I can, but I’ll have to do it manually, no power assist. Looking ahead, I’m hoping that the house will be full of painters next week, and I might have a hard time working in around them. Well.
In the afternoon email is a notice from Amazon that my book is now available for sale. I ordered three copies, although I’m not sure on whom I will bestow the third.
Sitting around in the afternoon I recalled a thought that drifted through my mind a couple of times lately: recalling Emma Lazarus’ famous sonnet about the Statue or Liberty, The New Colossus, I wondered what kind of sonnet she might write about today’s immigration policy. Well, how about me, could I write a sonnet? And over about 90 minutes, I did, complete with proper sonnet rhyme scheme (mostly) and iambic pentameter (ok, ok, there’s one extra foot in one line, sue me).
(Removed, so as to meet the rules of most poetry magazines which don’t want anything published before, even in a personal blog.)
Since I’d never written a sonnet before, I think I’ll call this a day.
Codgerville 